Vote settings

After your contest receives some submissions. Your users will be able to vote for the different submissions. It’s the time to configure the voting settings. This article will have details on the Vote tab in the contest editor precisely.

Type

With TotalContest, you can have voting in 2 different ways:

Incremental (count)

Where each submission will have a number indicating the votes. It starts with 0 and increase by one with every vote.

If there is a submission with 11 votes and it receives a new vote from one of the users, it’s number of votes will simply become 12 and so on.

Average (rate)

Where each submission will have a scale. So users will have to give their rating on specific criterion you will be able to configure.

If you have a graphic design contest for example, you can enable this method of voting and let other users vote based on 3 scaled criterion (idea, visual impact and quality).

By selecting this method of voting, you will have the options to enter your criterion.

Scale: Defines the scale for each grading point of your criterion. In other words, it’s similar to the maximum rating the user can give to each side of the criteria. Back to our example above, selecting 5 means users will be able to give from 1/5 up to 5/5 for each grading aspect like idea, visual impact and quality.

Criteria: The grading points the users will rate based on. You can add new ones by clicking Add new.

Limitations

The limitations are the ways to control voting in your contest from different aspects:

Time period

Will start accepting votes within a period of time. Users will not be able to vote before or after that period. It has the following fields:

Start date: Will specify the date and time where votes will start to get accepted.

End date: Will specify the date and time where votes will stop being accepted.

Membership

The membership limitation will make your contest accept votes from specific users who have specific roles only. It has the following field:

Required membership roles: Select the roles that can vote. You can select multiple roles by holding the Control key on Windows or Command key on Mac.

Quota

Quota is the number of submissions to be accepted before stopping accepting any other submissions. This is necessary if you need a specific number of submissions only. This limitation has the following field:

Number of submissions: The number of votes to accept and votes will be closed after reaching this number.

Frequency

Frequency options are the number of votes to accept from users on submissions for every period of time. This can block any attempts to vote multiple times generally or for specific submission or any other criteria where voting become restricted based on your rules and regulations. You will see the following options:

Block based on: The methods that will be used to block any attempts to enter submissions more than the allowed amount for each user. This is a big topic to talk about. Thus, you may visit frequency limitations article for more details.

Votes per user: The number of votes allowed for each user. i.e. 2 will let each user vote twice and only twice.

Votes per submission: The number of votes to accept from a single user on the same submission. i.e. 2 will let the user vote twice on and only twice on the same submission.

Timeout: The timeout where voting will be allowed again to the user. So if the votesper user was 2 and the timeout was 1440 (1 day in minutes). This means the user can vote twice every day.